


Scarves and Layers

by calmlikesurrender



Series: Started but don't plan on finishing. [3]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, University AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-14 20:36:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/841119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calmlikesurrender/pseuds/calmlikesurrender
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Niall and Harry go to the same university and Niall’s a shitty student but an amazing athlete. Harry’s fucking Niall’s Shakespeare teacher, Professor Payne. And Zayn and Louis are basically just there for my entertainment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scarves and Layers

Harry soaks in the weak scent of last night’s pine candle, the sharp comforting warmth of burnt paper. It’s always frigid in his dorm room, so cold he sleeps in sweaters with quilts piled across his bed, but that’s how he’s always liked it. He can’t write when he’s warm. It has to feel like he’ll be shivering if his fingers don’t move across the page. Or when he’s hunched over his computer screen in the middle of the night, he likes his coffee piping hot and he needs scarves and layers. Now he’s not even awake yet, barely sitting up, but his notebook’s cradled in his lap and he’s writing the way he only can, when he’s half dead and it’s five in the morning and he has to squint to see the dark page lines in the dark. Too worried that if he gets out of bed to gather his glasses from the floor where they’d fallen, he’ll lose this itch to write. This urge that had all but woken him up an hour before he usually started getting ready for class.

            It had started as a poem, but it’s finding its own voice now. A song, maybe. Whatever it is, the form slips right through his fingers. He yawns, fumbling at his nightstand, knocking over pens and a few unsteady textbooks before gripping the handle of the mug he’d been drinking before he fell asleep.

            He sips it cold now, tapping his pen on the back of his hand when he comes to a pause, searching for the right word.

            Across the room, Zayn’s mumbling in his sleep. Nothing Harry can make out, but after a year and a half of rooming with him, he’d all but given up anyway. Beneath the murmurs, there’s the soothing almost ethereal sway of choir voices. Zayn sleeps with gospel in his headphones, lit cigarettes hanging from his fingers that Harry always dutifully snuffs out before they can drop to the rug.

            _Repose_ he thinks suddenly, jotting it down. Then crossing it out. He reads it to himself, barely a whisper. Then again in his head. Again out loud. He can tell the rush is seeping away. He’s too _awake_ now to still be in the heady high of that pre-dawn urge to create a world on the page. Zayn’s muttering, the bitter coffee, the light starting to seep through their thick drapes.

            It’s all distracting and comforting and _familiar_ , every little noise and smell, but nothing more than the prickly feel of Liam’s bare legs sliding over his under the covers. His soft hand gripping Harry’s hip in his sleep almost out of habit.

             Harry gives him another ten minutes before shaking him a little.

            “Class,” he whispers, sipping at the dying breaths of his coffee. Staring longingly across the tiny room to the coffeemaker on the edge of his desk.

            Liam grumbles, shifting closer to him, the stubble on his chin tickling Harry’s side, “How long?”

            “Half an hour.”

            There’s a long, melodramatic groan at that, but a little later they’re both up, washing in his and Zayn’s small bathroom, scraping come off of Liam’s suede shoes.

            All he has is the sweater he’d come over in the night before and a pair of now crumpled khakis. They’ve done this a hundred times, though. Harry digs through Zayn’s drawers for a dark button-up and tosses it to Liam. He wriggles a plain tie out of the clump of them near the bottom, and tosses him that, too. With his hair brushed then he looks decent enough. At least, less like he’s just rolled out of bed.

            He fishes his briefcase and wallet out of the piles of books scattered around Harry’s side of the room like a battlefield, kisses him goodbye before leaving though Harry will be right behind him a few minutes later.

            They never leave together, though the number of students heading to Intro to Shakespeare at seven in the morning was hardly a stampede. Harry would tell himself it was the necessary caution of it all, and Liam would agree adamantly, and they’d keep a few minutes between them.

            With this, Harry gathers his things, not that there’s much. Each, though, in their state of disrepair. His glasses he pushes up high on the bridge of his nose, ignoring the spider leg cracks in the left lens. His messenger bag with the faulty strap he’d stapled together then eventually ducktaped, a floppy bent book, his journal. He slips into a sweater, and sniff tests his only pair of jeans before slipping them on. Zayn’s comatose before noon every day, so Harry doesn’t wake him, but he moves his cigarettes a few inches away on the nightstand so if he wakes up groggily, he’ll be less tempted.

            He buys a coffee on the way, trailing in with the last of Liam’s students, sitting in the front row of the massive auditorium-sized class. A scheduling error, a room that could sit two hundred easily was full already with nearly fifty. A basic literature class, essentially for first-years, but there are always a few straggling upperclassmen hoping to bump their GPA up with an easy A. Harry’s not enrolled, but he likes to come every now and then.

             He’s daydreaming, coasting, but it doesn’t matter. He could do this in his sleep. _King Lear’s_ the volume he carries around in his bag. It’s dog-eared and late-night-coffee-stained. And there are so many notes inside, he can barely read the text at some parts. Every time Edmund speaks, Harry finds some beauty in it, and he has to mark it up.

            He doesn’t need Liam’s lecture on patriarchy, so he’s daydreaming and wondering whether it’d be fun or mad to attempt a sonnet, when the classroom door swings open and it starts to smell like someone bathed in beer and sweat.

            There’s a calm hush where everyone’s eyes trail that way, to the lithe frame . Stitched across the front of his book bag is a wide Greek W. Even with the dumbed down , he’s practically got dollar signs sprawled out on his forehead, standing there in brand new tennis shoes Harry would need half a year’s worth of checks to pay for.

            The boy in the doorway doesn’t even pause, a lazy smile slathered across his face, his blond hair teased back in a loose ponytail. He’s trumping right in front of Liam to saunter up the auditorium stairs. His eyes are half-lidded, the sallow stench of booze and sex trailing after him thick like he’d climbed out from between someone’s legs and came straight to class.

            “ _Mr. Horan_ ,” Liam says, in a tone Harry’s never heard before. Or at least, never outside of bed. It’s not his usual gentle voice, but one decidedly more intimidating.

            If the boy thinks so, he doesn’t show it. He’s digging through his leather book bag to pile the contents across his desk. Chips, soda, a smashed muffin, a few candy bars, the soggy remnants of what seems to be a rather old burrito.

            “Yeah,” he says, finally digging out a pen only to stare at it for a moment and thrust it back in, “What’s up, man?”

            There are a few scattered giggles, but mostly silence. Liam clenches his jaw, “You’re late again, Niall.”

            The boy seems genuinely confused by this for some reason. He stares around at the others, groans, “Dude, what time is it?”

            “See me after class,” is all Liam says, briskly before falling back into his lecture. 


End file.
